Liero can be played in browser now, for those who remember | Hacker News Reader

Liero can be played in browser now, for those who remember

webliero.com

335 pointsfarseer86 comments

>Liero is a video game for MS-DOS, first released by Finnish programmer Joosa Riekkinen in 1998. The game has been described as a real-time version of Worms. [...] Inspired itself by the earlier game MoleZ, Liero provided inspiration for the later games Soldat and Noita.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liero

I was going to come here and say that it reminds me of MoleZ. Glad to see it was an inspiration!

liero source code was released. Maybe MoleZ used it?

Liero was heavily inspired by MoleZ, not the other way around

Does real time means that it was not turn based in this context? I cant open the link on the Iphone because my browser isnt supported

Correct. That's the crucial difference to Worms; similarities include destructible terrain, similar (large) choice of weapons and importance of ninja rope to move around.

I'm just learned about this game via Noita, which is a sort of Liero / Spelunky / falling sands mash-up. I don't know how I missed Liero. It's incredible!

Edit: link: https://noitagame.com/

When I was looking at the trailer for Noita I couldn't stop thinking about liero!

PowderToy is also excellent and fully free and open source, falling sands, material interaction, etc.

https://powdertoy.co.uk/

At high school we were not allowed to play games in the computer lab. Liero fit on a floppy disk so we could hide a copy of it on nearly every computer and play it during every break when the teacher was not present in the lab room. Good memories of nuking the hell out of everyone and filling the screen with Zims and watching the poor worms die! :)

At my school someone yanked the campaign maps and most of the models out of Quake 1 so it fit on a floppy. Funny thing, the school was pretty small and the sysadmin personally knew most of the senior guys, being just a few years older—so he likely regularly hung out with the one whose invention he had to clean out from the machines every few days.

Very cool. Everyone knew about liero in my childhood. I wish someone did this for wings2, a legendary cave flier from the same era. I owe my interest in programming to the amazing lua scripting API. One summer holiday I helped create a community weapon pack with my friends. Although it was completely imbalanced it was great fun along the normal online play, which was more competetive and skill based. For several years we had a small community of around 20 people playing but sadly it died of in my teens. I wish I had a way to contact all those guys and setup a discord server for the occasional game.

Reminds me of Soldat, which has much more ergonomic controls imho https://store.steampowered.com/app/638490/Soldat/

Liero was one of Soldat's inspirations.

As somebody who "squandered" countless joyful hours playing both Liero and Soldat, I can say Soldat is a much more fun game with its mouse-driven controls (and right-click jetback).

I recommend playing Soldat's Capture The Flag mode with around 5 player a side. Some of the most enjoyable gaming moments. Such a great game. And free! (though later in life I registered to give back to the dev)

I haven't yet had a chance to play the recently released Soldat 2 demo yet! :)

Soldat 2 is in the works https://store.steampowered.com/app/474220/Soldat_2/

FINALLY some good news in 2020! Looking forward to this one very much!

I suggest sticking a bit with liero, it takes a bit to get used to the controls but it's so much fun once you get it!

If you prefer the mouse aiming, you might also like Teeworlds.

Btw, we thought and discussed about adding mouse aim to OpenLieroX, and we even had a prototype. But the community outraged about it and that was basically a complete new game, so they don't wanted to allow that you could network together with mouse aim and without because of unfair advantages. In the end we gave up and just did not implement mouse aim.

Liero was amazing as a computer lab game in high school. I think it fit on a floppy so you could share it easily. And it bypassed our locked down school computers because it just ran without being installed or whatnot.

I'm also impressed how well this ran on my budget phone. I can't play but spectating was butter smooth.

Yup. Frequently played it in labs and the library in highschool. Was a part of life back then. Good times.

Anyone here remember LieroM8/Lierokit? Such good times hacking away at this game in year 8 with my mate. There's nothing quite like an automatic bananabomb-blunderbus and low friction/gravity to speed the game up...

Glad you liked it. It was fun to figure out all the ways you could mod the game too. /Author of LieroKit

Thank you. Your software is a big part of some of my fondest memories :)

Hi Gliptic! Nice to see you here. :)

Likewise :)

Thanks as well! I have extremely awesome memories of playing Liero 1.33 and then Liero with ProMode like... 20 years ago? And ProMode was possible due to the tools your have created. I even fooled around a bit in Polish forums and IRC channels related to the Liero 'scene'...

I remember that you were reverse engineering Liero as Joosa lost the source code. Also there were some other attempts to recreate the feel of Liero with projects like Wurmz etc. I kind of stopped playing Liero back then but from what I remember 'physics' in those clones was always missing something. So TIL that there is Liero 1.36 and I wonder if it can brings those old memories ;-)

It's a secret to everyone, but it is possible to run a WebLiero server with custom mods by providing a json/json5 file and a wlsprt file (which uses a custom but simple binary format) to the in-game "/loadmod" command. At this time, however, the author is still developing mod support and the formats (JSON schema in particular) are subject to change so... caveat emptor.

That said, if anyone is interested in tweaking WebLiero mods and is not afraid to get their hands dirty, I wrote a (very rudimentary) program to convert .wlsprt to a folder of indexed-color PNG files and vice-versa[1]. You'll probably also want a copy of the "official" mods to use as a reference[2].

At the risk of counting chickens before they hatch, I am actually in the process of writing a mod editor in the spirit of LieroKit/LieroM8 that would smooth some of the rough edges of modding this game. I'm calling it WebLieroKit, unfortunately due to the timing of this post making the front page I cannot provide a working demo but I felt it was worth mentioning while there are eyeballs around.

[1] https://phazon.xyz/files/liero/wltools.tar.gz [2] https://phazon.xyz/files/liero/mods.tar.gz

Me and my friends have been playing WebLiero for three weeks now (around 4 hours per week).

I think it's funny, that for 5 guys with beefed up computers and Steam-accounts, nothing beats WebLiero.

The combination of nearly 100% destructible environments, ninja rope and weapons that actually works differently is just such a wonderful combination.

Oh someone dug a hole and is shooting player-controlled missiles from it? Well then we know the user wont be moving, so lets use a laser to destroy the environment next to him from a whole screen away. BAM!

I can't understate just how destructible environments is a underutilized game changer.

This is the only game we found that was actually fun and I wouldn't change a thing.

Thank you Mario C!

There's a nice multiplayer online open-source reimplementation of it called OpenLieroX.

Would definitely give that a try, Liero has fond highschool memories for me.

Thanks for mentioning that. I'm one of the main developers of it.

I feel a bit sad that I rarely have time to work on it anymore. It has evolved into kind of an infinite project. After the merge of the technical very nice Gusanos engine (another open-source Liero clone, heavily scripted by Lua, with lots of advanced graphics effects) into OpenLieroX, it has a lot of nice features now, but the code is somewhat bloated (although this merge has progressed really far, and was done on a very low level). E.g. I would like to get rid of most of the old stuff totally and move the whole logic over to Lua. The network engine is another part which probably needs a better more modern reimplementation. The rendering also could probably be improved a lot. It's all software pixels, via SDL, with lots of graphics effects, and that's slow.

OpenLieroX homepage: http://www.openlierox.net/ Code: http://github.com/albertz/openlierox/

Official and Open Liero: http://www.liero.be/

Thanks for developing OpenLieroX! I have very fond memories of both the original Liero and later OpenLieroX. We used to play it a lot with friends back in the day. We just recently started playing it again during our video calls with friends due to social distancing. It's been great fun and it's awesome that this gem is still available and works on modern systems. Cheers for the effort!

Thanks for developing OpenLieroX. That was peak Liero for me, with smooth network play, tons of mods, and an active competitive community.

Thank you for your work. Spent way too much time playing this online with friends and family!

Great to see so many of the old gang here!

Here is a thread with the author discussing implementation details.

Pretty interesting stuff!

https://community.haxe.org/t/webliero-a-game-made-with-haxe/...

I played a lot of Liero around 15 years ago. I also looked at the various remakes at that time.

My problem with all of the remakes back then was that none were very faithful to the physics/handling of the original Liero. This was at the time an acknowledged problem, that the excellent Liero physics were hard to replicate.

Has this changed? How closely does this mirror the original Liero in terms of physics? (I'm not at a device where I can fairly test it myself.)

WebLiero strives to be as accurate to the original as possible, and from what I can tell recreates the physics, objects, and particles systems using the same general structures as the original. It derives its physics constants and other gameplay data, including weapons definitions, from the original game and optionally can swap definitions from a selection of the original Liero's mods. Similarly new custom mods can be created, see my other comment in this thread.

It is worth mentioning that officially Liero has been recreated and is an open source project. So the details of the physics engine are now public. The code for v1.36 is a modern rewrite of v1.33, of which the source code has been lost. See https://liero.be/ for more history.

Yes, I did try WebLiero out once I had the opportunity, and it indeed feels just like the original. Incredible job by the authors.

This is a port of the original Liero, so 100% accurate physics.

The number of remakes really was a homage to how incredible the game is. I remember myself and my friend on the floor crying in laughter over some modded Liero shenanigans. As far as I remember, the original Liero webpage described Liero as a game built around an idea for physics - so replicating said physics isn't entirely trivial.

I also recall that OpenLiero was doing a "whitebox" implementation of the physics (much like OpenRCT). That project should be pretty close if you're looking for something run on your desktop.

This page is 1000% spot-on. My muscle memory even kicked back in, after more than a decade.

Same here, I still remember young me and my friend crying of laughter on the floor playing this game :')

It seems digging is much slower than in the original. Otherwise it's very similar.

I haven't noticed it being slower, but you can also bind a single key to the dig action (original Liero didn't have that option), which in my experience results in much faster digging than with the old hold forward + tap back combo.

Consistently fails to connect over here on a slow 14K/s link tunneled through an ssh SOCKS5 proxy.

Not sure if the game should be playable in these conditions, but it does seem to aggressively give up hope when joining a room.

haha! now that is a great link you've got there. here's hoping you are somewhere remote / peaceful / beautiful enough to enjoy the tradeoff! 8^)

Oof. Though I have fond memories of playing HoverRace over dial-up links as well as Liero on local co-op...

One of the very few games that made me actually laugh with joy - let's see in what kind of shape my band of 30-something dads that I've known since college is after all these years.

Wow this game was a classic.

I recommend setting loading time to zero in the room settings for maximum fun/chaos.

If you want to get the original running in linux:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3u9hna/how_to_get_li...

EDIT: Ok, this worked a few years ago, it's not working for me today on 18.04.

You can probably just run the original executable on DOSBox.

In case you're wondering, this appears to be a hobby project made with Haxe (which the author seems to be a fan of). However it's not open source.

https://community.haxe.org/t/webliero-a-game-made-with-haxe/...

I'm impressed at how many decent players are in there. Liero controls take a while to get used to, so I opened this thinking it would be a total noobfest. I'm mostly thrown off by the controls being different from what I was used to.

You can remap them!

Somehow I was instantly able to remember the controls almost perfectly although it has been 20 years since I've played it.